MediaMath Blog - Uncategorized

main

Data Technology Uncategorized

The Importance of Omnichannel and its Role in Driving Programmatic Performance

February 22, 2016 — by MediaMath

Adopting an omnichannel approach is arguably one of the most commonly recognised strategies in the world of marketing and advertising. Not only does it help to streamline activity between internal departments and improve internally efficiencies, it also helps to ensure the end-user experience is seamless and consistent across all potential touchpoints.

In the French market, it’s a slightly different story. Most agencies are incredibly siloed in their approach, with each team taking charge of their designated specialism, whether that be search, display or social. The notion of taking an omnichannel approach is therefore a rather alien concept and, as a result, there is a huge gap in brands’ and agencies’ ability to activate effective performance-driven strategies. Silos, after all, often breed inefficiencies and confusion.

At Cojecom, we pride ourselves on our progressive thinking. Since adopting a programmatic approach to digital advertising and setting up our own internal trading desk, we have been working with MediaMath to enhance our ability to execute multi-channel campaigns through a single integrated interface. We see this as a critical component to our ongoing development and innovation in the digital advertising arena.

Partnering with MediaMath has enabled us to dramatically change the way we set up and run campaigns and utilise the benefits of a programmatic approach. Despite this, it does seem the French market is in need of a bit of shake-up. Whilst there can be no denying the adoption of programmatic in the UK is very high—it currently sits at around 59%—France has been unable to develop at a comparable rate. Whilst it is catching up, France sits in European third place in terms of programmatic adoption. Therefore, there is a big education piece needed in order for the benefits of programmatic to be fully realised and fulfilled.

Convincing prospects and clients to shift a larger proportion of their budget to digital and programmatic continues to be challenging, as it needs to become the primary media focus of their advertising strategy. In addition, we also need to explain how programmatic can be used for quality. It was not that long ago that the space was full of bad inventory. As technology has advanced, we’ve been able drive improvements in ROI, pay a higher CPM if better targeting can be assured, buy above the fold inventory, negotiate private deals and verify ads with a greater level of precision. However, for this to be truly effective, clear goals need to be established with the advertiser. Price is not the most important criteria any more; it should be quality and the right level of targeting.

This emphasises the importance of knowledge sharing, particularly where programmatic advertising technologies and collaborative working meet and merge. Even though the adoption of programmatic is high, people still need clarification on the technology and the benefits that it offers. An omnichannel strategy is crucial to making this a reality. However, companies can only improve their capabilities by properly training their staff on how to use these technological developments.

Having one account manager responsible for looking after all active channels, for instance, enables them to have a better overview of the advertisers and determine how best to assign budgets to the best performing channels. For example, if Cojecom has a social, mobile or digital display communication for an advertiser, and realises that mobile does not work but social performs significantly better, budgets can be immediately shifted accordingly. When teams are isolated in separate divisions, the ability to activate this quickly and efficiently can prove to be rather problematic.

With the advent of new channels such as video rapidly accelerating up the agenda, action is needed now and fast. Ultimately, a clear and well-defined goal is crucial to any successful programmatic strategy. Any partner, therefore, needs to be constantly assessing what is working and, more importantly, what isn’t working and adjusting the strategy accordingly. For us, MediaMath does that in abundance, but in order for growth in the French market to continue, much more is needed. From our experience, partnerships and the free flow of information open up new potential buying strategies and insight on emerging data partners. Then, if you can implement these on a cross-channel level, results will manifest organically. It’s these insights which are driving a real business change and improving the service we provide to our clients.

Data Uncategorized

5 Questions with MediaMath’s CEO, Joe Zawadzki

February 19, 2016 — by MediaMath

This post originally appears on LiveRamp. LiveRamp recently sat down with Joe Zawadzki, Chairman and CEO for MediaMath, to get his thoughts on the future of marketing and the challenges CMOs are facing right now. This blog is a compilation of those conversations. MediaMath is a gold sponsor of #RampUp16.

What marketing trends do you predict will be most prominent in 2016?

There are three key trends for 2016:

We’re going to see the rise of true programmatic marketing: integrated audience management and omni-channel execution at scale, marrying advertising and marketing with connected technology.
There will be greater adoption of a programmatic-first approach, where the entirety of media spend is informed by programmatic and machine learning-driven decisioning and optimization that results in smarter spend. This is all in the name of reaching, knowing, and messaging your customers in better ways. It’s about delivering a more seamless, relevant user experience that drives true outcome-based results.
Traditional walled gardens – platforms where advertisers can get their data in but cannot get it out – will start to open their walls and cooperate with a selection of unbiased partners like MediaMath.

What do you think is the single biggest challenge CMOs are facing today?

Resolving the tension between scalability and innovation.

You have a bunch of processes that are scalable, such as buying broadcast TV, and then innovative programmatic methods that lead to far more precise and more efficient audience targeting.

How do you keep your feet in both camps?

How do you make innovative things scalable and scalable things innovative?

How will they overcome it?

Start with your goals – the business goals – and not your marketing metrics. Work backwards.

Think of it as analyzing investments from a pretax versus after-tax perspective with transaction costs included. Returns can look wildly different with those two different lenses. Marketing is the same way.

Think about how different answers are produced with a sophisticated multitouch attribution model versus last click.

Think about how you make different decisions about where to invest if you include the cost of fraud, or based on value instead of price.

What you are trying to accomplish from a business perspective totally changes your marketing approaches.

Can you tell us about a CMO who inspires you?

We have a belief in the higher purpose of marketing.

People think about marketing as a megaphone and demand generation channel. What’s as important is being the voice of the customer coming into the organization. Think about what the customer needs from your product.

Marketing is seen as an external activity but a lot of it is internal. You must teach your people to be advocates and champions of the worldview and organization that created it, not just the product/service.

Recruiting everyone to become marketers, not just the marketing department, is critical for alignment and amplification. It’s as much about putting things into the organization as pushing them out.

Our CMO, Joanna O’Connell, represents that mindset in spades.

She has a point of view for where the market’s going, informed by her time at Forrester, AdExchanger, at Razorfish building the first trading desk–transparent, disclosed.

She’s a seeker of truth, —she actually wants to come to the right answer. That’s refreshing.

We have other CMOs who have similar attributes. Liza Landsman from Jet.com is awesome.

Her title, Chief Customer Officer, is a visible manifestation of her belief that marketing needs to be responsible for the customer experience, all the way through product design and promise.

My hope and fervent belief is that this will be the way the whole world thinks about the role in the years to come!

Why are you attending RampUp 2016, and what are you most excited for?

RampUp has historically been the place where the industry insiders go.

It’s the practitioners’ conference, so it tends to create deeper dialogues and real ideation around improving partnerships, which is rare to see at conferences attended by people new to the space or with less complementary worldviews.

Events PROGRAMMATIC Trends Uncategorized

Can Programmatic and Guarantees Exist in Harmony?

February 18, 2016 — by MediaMath

While programmatic advertising continues to evolve, could the traditional method of upfront deals be making a comeback?

MediaMath, along with a select group of media industry leaders, attended “Beet Retreat 2016” in Puerto Rico earlier this month — a networking event for executives — to talk about all things digital video, including the future of programmatic buying.

Our very own Sam Cox, MediaMath partnerships VP, joined a panel by Beet.TV to discuss programmatic on the buy side, shedding light on the fact that you can indeed merge programmatic and guaranteed advertising.

“Programmatic is neither real-time nor bidded,” Cox said, “by working with the publisher as well to get them to understand that you can make a forward commitment on a guarantee on a specific volume, a specific value and flight dates and hit it, while delivering a greater return for the marketer, is an important thing to get out to both sides.”

So what does the arrival of upfront ad deals mean for programmatic?

Further to his point, Cox mentioned the importance of striking a balance — by having embraced header tags, allowing real-time data to support guaranteed transactions and by having eliminated exchanges.

Click here to watch the full session from Beet.TV

Data Uncategorized

5 Questions with LiveRamp

February 17, 2016 — by MediaMath

MediaMath has a very strong partnership with LiveRamp on multiple fronts. As a reseller of LiveRamp’s Data Onboarding and Customer Link products, we are constantly looking for ways to better and deepen the way we work together.

With LiveRamp’s annual conference, RampUp, just under a week way, we are very excited about having our CEO, Joe Zawadzki, speak on a panel about the future of ad tech and our SVP of Vertical Practices, Abhijit Shome, participate in the “Technology Partners” track of the pre-conference event.

I recently chatted with LiveRamp’s Chief Product Officer, Anneka Gupta, to find out what’s new at LiveRamp and what she’s looking forward to at RampUp.

1. What trends do you think will define 2016 in the ad tech and marketing tech ecosystem, and how will data connectivity play a role?

We’re seeing marketers beginning to really embrace the vision for omni-channel marketing. Typically this includes breaking down internal silos, deploying more technology in-house and adding a data connectivity layer to the marketing stack that makes it easy to move data between ad tech and mar tech platforms.

One of the hot topics I’m particularly excited about is the concept of “people-based marketing.” We all know that consumers use a variety of devices and connect with a brand across a broad range of touchpoints. We’re seeing marketers make a bigger push to know which devices and offline interactions relate to the same consumer, so they can do a better job with segmentation, frequency capping and attribution. I believe this will fundamentally change the way consumers are delivered marketing and how marketers measure the effectiveness of their outreach.

2. You’ve launched Customer Link—a new data connectivity service. How do you see this driving your business?

We know marketers want to create a unified view of their customers to fuel insights that can then be incorporated into their marketing strategies to increase engagement. But with so many channels and devices out there, it’s been incredibly difficult for them to link data from different sources to create an accurate view of customer journeys. Customer Link addresses this problem head-on by connecting online and offline activity across channels and devices at the consumer level in a privacy-safe way, so brands can finally create a unified view of their customers. Some of the world’s largest companies have already adopted the service to analyze cross-channel campaigns, perform closed-loop measurement and refine audience models.

3. You’ve recently partnered with Beintoo to tap into geo-behavioral data for cross-device targeting—would you say this is the future of targeting? How will marketers and brands benefit from this?

This partnership provides marketers with a rich asset that can be incorporated into understanding the customer journey. Geo-behavioral data helps marketers understand how consumers are interacting with their brand out in the physical world. This data also provides unique insight into user intent and interests.

It’s hard to claim that any one thing represents the future of targeting, but we are certain that geo-behavioral data combined with people-based marketing will create a future where every message a consumer receives is relevant and meaningful.

4. Cross-device targeting is a fairly new implementation—what challenges do you think this will bring and how do you hope to solve for it?

Successful cross-device targeting is dependent on overcoming the obstacles of reach and accurate recognition. The real challenge that many marketers face when doing cross-device targeting is whether a deterministic or probabilistic approach is better for them. At LiveRamp, we think both strategies have their time and place. While at LiveRamp we focus on deterministic matching, we partner with other cross-device players to fuel their probabilistic models. In turn, our clients can use LiveRamp’s deterministic matching, a partner’s probabilistic model, or both depending on their desired outcome and the trade-off they are willing to make between accuracy and reach.

5. We’re getting ready for RampUp next week. What will be some of the stand-out topics and discussions?

It’s hard to pick favorites in the RampUp agenda this year. I’ll make a shameless plug for the panel “Future of Ad Tech” with Mediamath’s CEO, Joe Zawadzki. MediaMath fans who can’t make it to the event will be able to view the video on the conference site after the show. I’m also personally excited about the session AdExchanger’s John Ebbert is hosting on what’s happening in mobile, as well as sessions that Gartner and Forrester are leading on trends in data and smart TV.

See the other posts in our “5 Questions with…” series here.

Technology Uncategorized

NMI Introduces LATAM to Live Courses in Digital Marketing and Programmatic

February 17, 2016 — by MediaMath

Last year was a pivotal year in the world of programmatic advertising. Overall spend eclipsed $14 billion dollars as marketers around the globe began to see data-driven machine learning not as an experimental way to purchase inventory, but the preferred method. Though North America still leads the pack in terms of the adoption of programmatic, their neighboring markets to the south are quickly gaining ground. eMarketer predicts that programmatic spending in Latin America will increase by roughly 200 percent in 2016. With such rapid growth in the region comes an undeniable need for purposeful education.

Last year, the New Marketing Institute (NMI) introduced live Spanish-language TerminalOne trainings to MediaMath clients. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Clients across the region expressed immense enthusiasm around attending live, interactive training sessions geared toward their markets and facilitated in their native languages.

One reason these courses received such high praise is that they met a long-standing need. Culturally, Latin America embraces a hands-on approach to learning. Previous programmatic education available in the region was either English-language based or consisted of learners simply viewing videos or reading documents in a static environment. Given the region’s strong preference for active as opposed to passive learning, these approaches were destined to fall short. When the regionally-focused, person-to-person TerminalOne sessions launched, programmatic education finally came alive.

NMI recognizes the importance of learner-centered education in Latin America and is excited to build from the success of the initial platform trainings. Beginning next week, NMI will offer Introduction to Digital Marketing and Programmatic 101 trainings in the same format. These courses will be available to anyone with interest in expanding their digital marketing knowledge.

The prevalence of big data has pushed digital marketing into a new landscape, with programmatic advertising at the global forefront. As the landscape continues to evolve, NMI will continue to meet the learner where they are geographically, culturally and in their own market. NMI is committed to supporting professionals through their journey to becoming a more knowledgeable, more versatile and more effective marketer.

To register for courses through NMI, please visit the Certification Calendar. For Spanish trainings, search “LATAM” in the keyword search.

Events Media Mobile Trends Uncategorized

Making Sense of a Fractured Mobile Landscape – Mobile World Congress 2016

February 16, 2016 — by MediaMath

Consumers have shifted their online attention from desktop to mobile over the past few years and as expected, digital advertisers’ budgets have followed suit. With mobile usage skyrocketing and transforming our daily lives, it’s only fitting that the theme for Mobile World Congress 2016 is “Mobile is Everything.” And as such, the mobile advertising ecosystem continues to expand with new companies entering the space – offering everything from “end-to-end” solutions to standalone features and capabilities, including better user tracking and targeting or interactive creative.

Mobile World Congress will, in essence, be a microcosm of the mobile advertising ecosystem. Every attending vendor and platform will have their pitch honed as to why their offering is the silver bullet, but anyone claiming to have the be-all-end-all solution in this still-nascent market definitely does not. MWC will bring together the best data and technology companies in mobile, but you will have to cut through the noise to find those that will help your business the most.

With such a fractured ecosystem of vendors attending the conference in Barcelona from February 22-25, and with 100k+ attendees expected, we are excited to be involved with Mobile World Congress for the second time and see it as a great opportunity to kick-start conversations about one-to-one marketing, networking with peers, meeting with clients about driving measurable outcomes and answering any questions – no matter how big or small – on all things programmatic. Whether it be kick-starting conversations with a promising vendor or re-engaging current partners on new opportunities, our goals for MWC fall directly in line with some of the overall industry trends and our goals of 2016:

Contextualising Location – One of the hot-button topics in mobile advertising is real-time, hyperlocal targeting, which involves targeting a consumer while they are in a specific geographic location – whether it be inside a specific brick-and-mortar store or a concert hall. Adding context to this capability involves knowing why a consumer is at that location and what their intentions are (for example, are they window shopping or purchasing?) and mobile advertising will become vastly more valuable once location data can be contextualised at scale.

Understanding Mobile Behavior – Tracking and segmenting users based on their behavior on mobile in the same way as desktop has brought mobile advertisers modest success, but there is still much to be learned about what consumers actually use their mobile phones for and what they want to use them for. If we know that a subset of consumers isn’t likely to convert on their mobile device, then does it make sense to serve them direct response ads? A consumer’s mobile phone behavior may be very different than their behavior on the desktop web, such as in the case where some consumers don’t yet feel comfortable transacting on their mobile devices, so they bookmark the e-commerce store from their phone to make a purchase later on their desktop.

Cross-device Targeting and Attribution – Consumers are more connected than ever and in a multi-device world, it becomes increasingly important to develop a deterministic unifying identifier, tracking a user’s engagement across all platforms – whether it’s through their smartphones, tablets or laptops. From frequency capping campaign exposures at the individual level to attributing conversions from different devices to the same individual, accurate cross device data and technologies have the ability to drastically reduce wasted ad spend and more accurately attribute conversion events on a truly one-to-one basis.

We at MediaMath are expecting great things from MWC and are excited to learn more about the industry’s future from up and coming technology companies, while also seizing the opportunity to show the industry how to take a programmatic approach to mobile and omni-channel advertising.

MediaMath at Mobile World Congress 2016

If you’re attending, head down to stand G20 in App Planet Hall 8.1 to speak to a programmatic expert.

We are also pleased to announce that our partners will be presenting at our stand – be sure not to miss it:

Tuesday 23 February

9D (11am) “Physical World Behavior Meets Mobile Programmatic” by Michael Miner – VP, Business Development
Visual DNA (3pm) “Next Gen Mobile Data: Targeting by Personality” by Raj Dhanda – VP, Global Supply

Wednesday 24 February

Lotome (11am) “Mobile Audience Targeting with Lotame” by Ryan Rolf – Director, Data Sales
Axonix (3pm) “Where advertisers reach first party mobile audiences in real time – An introduction to Axonix” by Simon Bailey – CEO and Zee Ahmad – Director of Programmatic

Thursday 25 February

xAd (11am) “Location Based Marketing, Without the Guesswork” by Dorothee Bergin – VP Programmatic
InMobi (3pm) “Understanding In App Mobile Data Signals & Creative” by Anne Frisbie, SVP, Global Alliances

Learn more about what we’re up to at Mobile World Congress 2016

Media OMNICHANNEL PROGRAMMATIC Technology Uncategorized Video

How Marketers can Maximise the Impact of Video Advertising through Programmatic

February 15, 2016 — by MediaMath

Building brand awareness through video advertising is more important than ever. But what’s more impactful is when brands combine video content with data-driven insights for their omnichannel campaign – targeting messages to the right consumer. This effectiveness is evident in the fact that European programmatic video advertising revenues are expected to increase by almost 40 percent every year, reaching €2bn by 2020.

In a recent article for The Drum, MediaMath’s Managing Director for EMEA, Dave Reed, explores the growth of video and shares his expertise on how brands can utilise programmatic video when optimising their omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Given that video is a powerful medium for brand awareness and developing consumer relationships, Reed cites how brands need more than just inspiring creative to be effective with their video advertising. He also mentions the success eBay have had with integrating programmatic video into their campaigns, and advises marketers on three key points:

Consider how viewability is assessed
Embrace the benefits of DSP technology
Increase programmatic video knowledge

Read the original article on The Drum

PROGRAMMATIC Technology Uncategorized

Header Bidding, Programmatic’s Flavor Du Jour

February 15, 2016 — by MediaMath

This article originally appears on MediaPost.

In the programmatic media universe, you can’t start a conversation these days without bumping into header bidding or ad blocking. Of the two, ad blocking seems to be the easier topic to discuss.

Almost everyone has an opinion on ad blocking from a personal and professional perspective. But header bidding? Not so much. The conversation invariably leads down a rabbit hole of waterfalls (definitely not the kind you discover in beautiful places), “primary growth drivers,” “monetization,” “pre-bidding” and more.

OK, here’s a working definition of header bidding. Please feel free to weigh in and tell me I’ve got it all wrong.

Header bidding, as I understand it, is basically advance bidding or “pre-bidding” on advertising inventory. It uses a programmatic process in which publishers offer up ad inventory to multiple ad exchanges at the same time, before making calls to their ad servers. The idea is that by permitting several demand sources to bid on the same inventory at the same time, publishers can significantly boost their yield and make more money.

Here’s how Sam Cox, VP of global partnerships at MediaMath — and a very smart guy — explains it:

The header gives you the ability to see 100% of publisher’s audience. With most exchange-based bidding, you only get exposure to a fraction of the publisher’s inventory.

“If someone has a header tag in place, [a little piece of code], I can see every user against every placement,” Cox said. “The publisher is the client of the SSP. When it places the header down, every user and every placement generates an exchange call. Normally the exchange doesn’t get called until the ad servers run through all the guaranteed campaigns. The DSP only sees what wasn’t consumed.”

Read the rest of the article here.

PROGRAMMATIC Technology Uncategorized

Spain: The Programmatic Forecast for 2016

February 12, 2016 — by MediaMath

Gonzalo Garcia, Country Manager for Spain at MediaMath, recently wrote for Marketing News detailing his programmatic forecast for this year. Below is an English translated version of the article, or you can read the original article in Spanish.

Programmatic is becoming a vital part of the Spanish digital advertising landscape and the future looks bright with penetration expected to exceed 30% by 2017. The willingness of brands to explore this trading model makes the programmatic market exceptionally dynamic, so what does the coming year have in store for programmatic in Spain?

Programmatic adoption will escalate
Programmatic adoption in Spain is growing faster than expected with a 43% increase in programmatic spend reported this year. We can expect to see programmatic growth continuing to accelerate over the coming year as brands and agencies experiment with the technology and understand that it can be used for a variety of marketing tactics, not just performance-based advertising. The market will also expand significantly as new technology providers emerge to take advantage of the business opportunities created by programmatic.

Data will be used holistically across channels
As the industry embraces programmatic, the data and insights generated will begin to be used holistically across all channels. Marketing activity that was previously undertaken in silos – such as mobile, search, and video – will share programmatic data to inform activity. While banner advertising currently accounts for the majority of programmatic spend in Spain, this will begin to change as channels such as video and social are absorbed into programmatic. Spend on programmatic video alone will grow from €15 million to €41 million in 2016, escalating to €98 million by 2020. Alongside this enhanced use of data to drive cross-channel marketing, brands will begin to adopt ‘always on’ programmatic activity rather than restricting the use of the technology to standalone campaigns.

Brands will seek programmatic knowledge
Brands are increasingly looking for efficient ways to understand, optimise, and communicate with their customers, and programmatic is key to making this a reality. Armed with the knowledge that programmatic will be central to their future marketing activities, 2016 will see brands seeking direct education on the benefits of the technology and how it works. While brands won’t necessarily look to take programmatic in-house, they will certainly want to take a more active role in working with their agencies to incorporate programmatic into their overall marketing strategies.

Programmatic jargon will be simplified
The demand for increased programmatic understanding will make education and training a major focus in 2016. This process will include simplifying the overly complex jargon that has developed around the technology, providing a clear explanation of concepts from RTB to programmatic direct. Over the coming year, we will see the industry working together to eliminate complexities and demystify programmatic, with technology providers leading the way. This simplification will allow programmatic to become more firmly established within the marketing landscape and progress into more advanced mediums such as programmatic TV.

The next twelve months will be an exciting time of growth and evolution for the programmatic market in Spain. The region will continue to attract ever-increasing levels of advertising spend, and disparate channels and tactics will be brought under the programmatic umbrella, propelled by a focus on holistic consumer-centric, data-driven marketing.

PROGRAMMATIC Technology Uncategorized

Client Story: Schwartz Journey to Real-Time Seasonal Targeting with Starcom Mediavest Group

February 11, 2016 — by Cedric Peillet

This blog post explores a campaign driven by Starcom Mediavest Group for Schwartz, one of the world’s largest producers of herbs, spices, seasonings and flavourings – and their objective was to promote Grill Mates, a selection of products associated with the summer season, especially BBQs. With the British weather being unpredictable, Schwartz wanted to develop Facebook ads to launch during periods of sunny weather to capitalise on potential demand – all in real-time.

With the aim of creating an automated system integrated with a weather API, coupled with goals of weather responsive ads in real-time and ensuring greater precision across all targeting, what was the solution and what were the results?

Find out how Starcom Mediavest Group helped Schwartz with their business objectives in their client story.

Newer Posts Older Posts